Thanks for reading! I uploaded this earlier, but I did it on my phone and it got all messed up, so I deleted it and re-uploaded. Sorry!
Very long author's note and excerpt from next chapter at the bottom!
I had never given much thought to love, at least not as far as it pertained to me. My parents married young, caught up in the rush of hormones and complacency that accompanied a long-term high school romance in a small town. I was born less than a year after they got married. They didn't even make it to their second wedding anniversary; shortly after my first birthday, my mother Renee took me and fled.
It wasn't my father Charlie she was running from, but the dreariness, the boredom that defined Forks, Washington. Charlie was a good man, a good husband, and a good father. He was the youngest and most promising sheriff's deputy on the force and he liked to hike and go fishing when he wasn't working, and he ate at the same small diner several times a week.
Charlie was unfailingly good and unfalteringly loyal, but whatever she felt for him just wasn't enough incentive for Renee to stay in the tiresome town in which he was so content. It was either cold or rainy, or an even more miserable combination of the two almost every day of the year. There was almost no sunshine in Forks, which explained why Renee tended to gravitate to sunny cities.
We moved every few years; Renee just couldn't settle down. By the time I was ten, I had called Reno, Fresno, and Jacksonville home. It seemed like every time we started to make a place a real home, that same creeping feeling of being entrapped would overtake her and she would pack me up and move along.
It was clear that Renee loved Charlie; what other possible explanation was there for why she never sought another man? She just didn't love him enough. He was a police deputy when I was a kid, and quickly rose through the ranks until he managed to snag Chief of Police. He was calm and quiet and steady, and he was reliable if not always very warm.
He would call a few times a week and we would sit through a painfully awkward, incredibly quiet thirty minutes. Charlie was a man of few words, and I was his daughter, after all. Sometimes, speaking just wasn't my strong suit either. I would spend a few weeks with him every summer, but that was the extent of my time with him. He was a decent father, at least as decent as he could be in the limited time we had together.
Until my thirteenth birthday. Renee and I moved to Phoenix, Arizona just a few months before my birthday and Charlie, quite uncharacteristically, decided to start using his annual time off on one long trip to Phoenix during the summers when he realized I didn't want to be with him in Forks. It was weird, but also kind of awesome. When Charlie was around, it was like we were a real family, if only for the few weeks we were all together.
When I was fifteen, I realized that my parents weren't just getting along better and keeping in touch for my sake anymore. They were actually just getting back together. I didn't expect it to be as nice as it was to have a mom and dad who actually loved each other, but it was really cool to get to at least be somewhat of a normal family.
Renee was never one to hold back a laugh, or to stifle her enthusiasm for life but with Charlie around, the light in her eyes intensified, looked more like legitimate happiness. Charlie, for his part, actually smiled when we were all together, and laughed, and spoke however haltingly about his feelings. Perhaps the best part, though, was that I didn't have to go to spend my summers in Forks anymore. I got to spend all of my time in Phoenix with my friends and my parents.
Until I didn't.
Just a few days after my seventeenth birthday, my parents sat me down at the kitchen table and told me that they were ready to really be together again, to be married, for the three of us to be a real family full-time.
Renee worked from home most of the time, running a relatively successful blog where she wrote about art and displayed some of her own paintings and pottery. On occasion, she would offer lessons, but her main income was from her blog which kept her from being stuck in any one place for too long. Charlie, on the other hand, had a whole life in Forks and a lot of responsibilities there, which meant that Renee and I would have to transplant ourselves right back to where we started.
Barely a week after they told me we were leaving, the lease on our apartment was broken and everything was packed and loaded in a trailer to be hauled to my father's small two-bedroom, one-bathroom house in Forks.
Fittingly, it was raining when I said goodbye to my friends in Phoenix.
I didn't speak to Charlie and Renee the entire drive to Forks; I was too stubborn, too upset, too heartbroken. I couldn't understand how Renee could do this to me, how she could pull me from the one place that had finally started to feel like home and force me back to the stifling, wet, cold place she had fled so many years before.
It was just two years. All I had to do was grit my teeth and bear it. It didn't matter that I was starting a new school in a new state just a couple months into my junior year. It didn't. I wouldn't put down any roots. I didn't have to make friends in Forks; I had gone almost thirteen years without making any real friends. I would just keep in touch with my friends in Phoenix and then go back after graduation no matter what Renee and Charlie wanted.
Then I met him. He was terrifying and beautiful, kind and cruel, ingratiating and aggravating, hot and cold. Part of me wanted to stay away from him, but I just couldn't.
I found myself at somewhat of an impasse. I could either play off my inquisitiveness as just that – mere curiosity – or I could admit, if only to myself, that there was something more at play, something drawing me in. It was as if he was a magnet and I was a lump of iron, impossibly attracted and incapable of resisting his pull.
No, I had never given much thought to my own love life, but then, wasn't it often said that the right thing comes along when you least expect it? Well, I certainly didn't expect it here.
I found friendship and, above all, love in the most unlikely of places, the most unlikely of creatures.
It was in this ever-green city that everything I had heard in myths and legends really came to life for me. I learned that the very creatures of legend that people feared but never really believed in truly did exist and were living among us. But they weren't as scary, as dangerous, as legend told. Or were they?
Hey, guys!
Thank you so much for reading this. I hope you enjoyed it, even though this is my least favorite chapter (I'm no good at intros, but SMeyer wrote one, so I wrote one). I hope you'll take my word for it that it gets much better from here, and I hope my word is truth.
This story is completely written, though all of the subsequent content is still in rough draft form. There are going to be 26 chapters including this intro and a very long epilogue. I will be posting a new chapter at least once a week.
Now, for the rambling!
I recently decided to reread the Twilight series after Stephenie Meyer announced the release date for Midnight Sun, and I remembered how much I actually enjoyed the books. There are some undeniably problematic themes, of course, but overall I still really enjoyed the story.
I haven't written Twilight fanfiction in at least ten years, and I deleted all of it when I started writing Harry Potter fic because it was all really bad. See: the one truly awful oneshot I left up here for giggles, if you dare. It's called Getting Even and I can't even get past the first line without nopeing right out of it.
But here I am with a brand new fanfic, and I assure you it's not nearly as bad as my old stuff. It follows the plot of the original book pretty closely in the beginning, and some of the dialogue is borrowed from the book, but there will be some small differences that vastly change the story:
Charlie and Renee's relationship is very different, obviously, and I decided to give Bella actual friends back in Phoenix.
I put a lot of effort into making Bella less of a Mary Sue, but I must admit that's one of my struggles as a writer as well, so I'm not sure how well I did. I'm concerned that I may have only succeeded in making her a Mary Sue who bites back a little harder.
I am trying to remedy some of the more problematic themes in Bella and Edward's relationship and Bella and Jacob's friendship. Ex: stalker tendencies, overly controlling behavior, sexual assault, etc.
Jacob is present in this story, as a bit less of a background character than in Twilight, but much less of a foreground character than in any of the subsequent books. He is not a romantic rival for Edward, though he does want to be. His feelings won't play a huge role. One thing I can't stand is a love triangle, so there will be absolutely none of that here.
And I think that's all for now! Again, thank you so much for taking the time to read! I hope you enjoyed, and I hope you stick around for the next chapter next Sunday afternoon!
Ch1. Shiny New Girl.
Jessica liked Mike. It was obvious in the way she forced a nervous chuckle and then watched carefully for my reaction. Hopeful, like she wanted me to reassure her that I didn't have any interest in Mike Newton. Wary, like she was worried I would start raving about the boy she wanted.
I just frowned and shook my head. "Boys."
"Boys," she agreed, rolling her eyes.